So basically I’ve got a shit load of beer here in the secondary at present.  I’ve got a tripel, a pumkin ale and a new old ale.  The tripel has been here for awhile as it wasn’t getting down to the FG I wanted so I’m giving it a few extra weeks.  The new old ale is a kit I got from Northern Brewer and is a kicked up Engrish Brown Ale.  As usual there was one ingredient missing from the kit, .5# of oats for a bit of mouthfeel so I had to do without.  We’ll see how it comes out.  I tasted a bit racking it to the secondary yesterday and it seemed ok, nothing special.

This was my third try at a Pumpkin Ale.  I went lazy this year and did the canned pumkin as opposed to prior years when I used actual raw pumpkin.  True to form, I still maintain no inate abilities to purchase ingrediants so instead of picking up three cans of pumpkin, I ended up with one can of pumpkin and two cans of pumpkin pie mix.  Screw it, I says to myself and used it anyway.  My thoughts were to use one 32oz can in each of the mash, the boil, and the primary.  I realized my grocery store error while adding a can to the boil and just decided to use both pumpkin pie mix cans inthe boil.  With all that pumpkin the boil, straing via my normal method using a hand held strainer covered in a hop bag just wasn’t cutting it so I was forced to forego this step and just dump it all into a carboy.  By the time I racked to the secondary yesterday there was about 6 inches of trub in the bottom leaving me with about 4 gallons left.  For spices (aside from what was included in the pie mix) I used one fresh vanilla bean, a tablespoon of fresh ground cinnamon, one teaspoon of ground ginger and one ground up fresh nutmeg.  When I tasted it going into secondary it seemed a bit mild onthe spices so I used an additional vanilla been, ground ginger, two cinnamon sticks and one fresh crushed nutmeg.

Here’s a pic of both the new old ale and pumpkin ale after a day in the primary:

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